This piece originally appeared in City Journal.
This school year, New York City public schools are conducting an experiment: Can they once again teach children to read? Following New York students’ dismal scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the “Nation’s Report Card,” Mayor Eric Adams has mandated a new curriculum for literacy that emphasizes phonics and moves away from the “balanced literacy” approach of the last two decades. It’s a change worth applauding: phonics is a well-studied educational approach that has clearly demonstrated its importance to children’s literacy. By contrast, balanced literacy, in which children learn to read by considering a word’s broader context, has been thoroughly discredited.
But if the research was clear from the outset about which method worked, why did New York spend years testing the wrong one? New York’s failures, and now its shift to a new approach, illustrate a challenge for teachers and education policymakers: how to disseminate and implement research findings more effectively. To get serious about bettering American education, improving the research-to-implementation pipeline will be crucial.
A major government research effort in the late 1990s shows the problem. In 1997, Congress asked the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and the Department of Education to develop a National Reading Panel to study how kids learn to read. After reviewing 100,000 studies, the panel concluded in its 2000 report that the “best approach to reading instruction” incorporates “explicit instruction in phonemic awareness” and “systematic phonics instruction”—precisely what New York is adopting now, more than 20 years later.
